For this you will need a flat bed toaster – ie two hot plates that you close on the sandwitch – not the ‘shell’ patterned traditional sandwitch toaster. Flat bed toasters are the kind used for paninis.

Black olives -– pre- sliced ones will save you a lot of work, though they go off quicker!

Red oOnions chopped into ‘strips’.

Sweet corn

Put spread or butter on bread to taste.
Cut thin slices of cheese and arrange on bread.
Put on the onion, olive slices and sweet corn.
Put other slice of bread on top -– make sure the spread/butter sides of the bread are inside the sandwitch and not on the outside as with traditional toasties.
Put in toaster until ready (this will depend on the toaster, some experimentation may be needed.).

De-shell the walnuts and breaake up into reasonable chunks.
Spread/butter to taste.
Peel, pitt and slice avoacado and place on bread.
Place walnuts on top and drizzele salad cream over.
Best as a closed sandwitch!

Put spreaed/butter on bread to taste.
Then generously smear the humous on.
Cut thickish slices of stilton -– careful, too thin and it crumbles! But beware, stilton is a strong cheese! Probably best if you just put chunks on, do not cover the entire surface.
Then drizzele mango chutney -– the runnier the better – over the top.
Options are: do you have it as an open sarni or as a closed roll? It’s up to you.

This origonally appeared on our internal home wiki and then later was placed upon our personal blog!

I like [[Wikipedia:Pesto]] sauce with pasta, and so does Sarah – as long as it’s freshly- made pesto, as encountered in restaurants. I’ll tolerate pesto sauce from a jar, which she won’t, but I still vastly prefer the fresh stuff.

One day I’ll set up the resources needed to make it, but in the meantime, today we found a way of reviving jar pesto… we were having [[Wikipedia:gnocci]] with sun-dried tomato pesto, but were both craving garlic, so I decided to liven the pesto up by pouring a bit of oil into a pan and frying a crushed garlic clove, then adding the pesto, then the gnocci.

The result was YUMMY. Not in the way that freshly made pesto is, but in a different way; the garlic somehow took the bitter edge off of the pesto’s taste, and made it lovely instead.

I plan to experiment with doing this to other types of pesto and seeing what the result’s like – but I’d still like to make my own fresh pesto sauce one day.

This is my new Food, Drink and Cooking blog – as some of you know it’s been along time in the coming and I just have too much stuff to o on our personal blog. I thought I’d start off by saying what cooking is to me:

For me learning to cook was just a natural extension of my scientific and artistic nature. It is the perfect combinationof the two disaplines, you mix inredints, you experiment with flavours and textures. Both happy accidents and meticulous planning yield amazing results and then you get to creat an assthesically pleasing master piece with the results!

Grandmothers with bakestones cooking traditional farye, arty aunts entertianing and of course Dads fanatastic radish salads had me mixing and sorting ingredients from the time I could first hold a spoon. However, the most valuable lessons were learned when me and my brother were simply ‘let loose’ in the kitchen.

One of my fondest memories of childhood is Dad’s fantastic radishes. This, of course, was all a ruse to get my brother to eat salad! We would start off by selecting leaves from an Oak Leaf lettuce. Then we’d rinse and spin them, spread them out on a large plate per person, cut two or three slices of cucumber per plate, and lay them carefully in the middle. The roundest radishes we could find, topped and tailed, were then cut in half with a zig-zagged line (using a sharp knife with a good point!), and one half was sat on top of each slice of cucumber.

These, we told David, were the water lily flowers upon the lily pads. Salad cream or thousand island dressing, drizzled around the edge, would mark the edge of the pond; and croutons scattered about the lily pads would be the fish in the pond.

This ruse, along with a few others, managed to convince a fussy child to get some fruit and vegetables into him. And so improvisation in cooking was a theme ever since I was young.

When we moved to the countryside and I was on crutches, I hobbled along our driveway collecting such oddities as wild garlic and hawthorn leaves for a more exotic salad, while my husband experimented with balsamic vinegar to create a herby dressing. More of a challenge was cooking for a bunch of fussy teenagers, including one strict vegan and one who refused to eat anything that wasn’t dripping with lard; by the end of the week, I had him eating my “hippie food”, as he termed it.

And so cooking, to me, is a form of self expression. Recipe books are more a source of inspiration than a dogmatic rulebook; improvising with what I have available, building up experience to improve my judgement of tastes and avert such disasters as the experimental “handful of dried chillies curry”, is much more fun!